1.1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to collaborative document systems like message control systems, and more particularly to electronic mail control systems.
1.2. Description and Disadvantages of Prior Art
Collaborative document systems represent a well established technology allowing to share electronic documents within a community of a large number of distributed users using their interconnected workstations for access to these collaborative document systems. A common feature of this technology is that the electronic documents to a certain extent obey a predefined structure of interrelated data fields. Typically the particular data fields making up an electronic document can be freely defined; examples for instance are: project name, subject, author, list of team members representing the primary editors, additional editors and the like. Type and number of these data fields typically depend on the particular purpose the electronic documents are used for.
A particular example of such collaborative document systems are the digital communication systems, called messaging systems. One specialized variant of these systems are of the “electronic message” or “electronic mail” type, which often are simply called email systems. In such systems, several or even a very large number of work stations are interconnected by a system which allows users at the work stations to send messages to each other. Such messages are the electronic equivalent of letters and memoranda.
In a typical messaging system there will normally be a standard format defined for such messages (or, often, a number of slightly different formats for different purposes). The format will normally have several fields, including a sender field, a date field, an addressee field (the TO: field), and a message body field; in addition, there will often be further fields, including in particular a “copy-to” field (the CC: field) and a “subject” field. The addressee and copy-to fields will often each be capable of holding more than one identifier, so that a message can be sent to several addressees and copied to several more. The “addressee” and “copy-to” fields are normally functionally equivalent as far as the system is concerned, with the distinction between the two being of significance only to the users.
In a typical prior art system, when a user generates a message, the system will automatically transmit it to the addressees (including the copy-to's). At each of the stations to which it is sent, it will be stored in a folder (which may well be termed the “in-tray” folder). When the users at that station choose to manually inspect the contents of the in-tray, they will extract the various messages from it one after another, inspect each, and take whatever action they think appropriate, such as deleting the message, printing it out, or storing it in some other folder.
In practice, it is found that such a procedure can become burdensome, because the number of messages which accumulates in the in-tray can become so large that a considerable amount of time and effort is required for the user to work through the accumulation of messages in the in-tray. Because the usage of such systems nowadays is so widespread and their handling has become quite simple the number of messages the typical user is receiving every day may be quite large; one may even expect that this number will increase further.
To cope with these increasing numbers of messages various technologies have been suggested within prior art.
Certain collaborative document systems, like for instance Lotus Notes, allow a sender to attach some type of sender specific priority to a certain message. The “Urgent” flag within Lotus Notes allows a sender to mark messages with the following levels of urgency: “Urgent”, “Normal”, “Just for information”. A serious disadvantage of such approaches is that this priority expresses only the author's (e.g. sender's) perception of urgency rather than the reader's individual perception of urgency, not to talk about a sender who willfully “oversells” the importance of his message. In particular if the document is targeted for several users, this mechanism cannot work.
Other prior art approaches consist in establishing filters which automatically filter out documents based on attributes occurring within a message (like for instance author, subject, size). This is an approach typically taken to filter out spam messages, i.e. messages advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup.
Other teachings, like for instance U.S. Pat. No. 5,377,354, provide technology for prioritizing a plurality of incoming electronic mail messages for a user by applying user created rules, which are stored in a rules-store, to said user's messages. After execution of these rules priority numbers are assigned to the messages which permit to sort said user's list of messages in accordance to this computed priority number.
To improve the handling of these rules the teaching of W. W. Cohen in “W. W. Cohen, W. W. 1996a. Learning rules that classify e-mail. In Papers from the AAAI Spring Symposium on Machine Learning in Information Access, 18-25” discloses to dynamically create such rules based on a proposed learning process.
Despite of all of these advances further progress is still required as users of such collaborative systems, especially messaging systems, are not satisfied with the current state of the art.
1.2 Objective of the Invention
The invention is based on the objective to improve the handling of messages directed to an user of an electronic messaging system.